What you can argue with perhaps is the sentimentality of equating harm to plants and animals with harm to people, and the way individual criminal acts are equated with the effects of corporate money&power.

Blah, blah, blah, blah! Referring to comments above not article, which I have now read. When I have the time, or think there is any point to attempting to communicate with such dull minds, I may respond more substantively.

An interesting quote. I find it in this context on everybody's favorite reference whipping boy, Wikipedia:

The philosopher Étienne Balibar wrote in 1993 that "there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be; on the other hand, Marx is more important for philosophy than ever before."[1] So even the existence of Marxist philosophy is debatable (the answer may depend on what is meant by "philosophy," a complicated question in itself). Balibar's remark is intended to explain the significance of the final line of Karl Marx's eleven Theses on Feuerbach (1845), which can be read as an epitaph for philosophy: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it".

After all my time on Earth attempting to change various things in the world for the better — some minor successes, plenty of "made no difference", I can only hope no major miscalculations with adverse results — I've become fairly convinced that to only approach the present problems of world ecology and to attempt to devise effective solutions (other than the most local and constrained) without regard to the longer time periods of human history and without thinking of what drives human behaviour, i.e. to only think in limited disciplines such as economics or hydrology, is a waste of time. I've also observed that many attempts to change the world completely screw it up.

Marx surely was attempting to derive a theory of how humans worked and related to each other using the intellectual tools of his time. We're now . . . what? 150 years later on and have significant new intellectual tools with which to understand the problems. Many of those tools have been developed only within the past twenty years and are largely concerned with the psychology, perceptions, and motivations of both individuals and groups of people. Some are woo-woo mystical to the profound materialists among us. However, not to avail oneself of these tools, not to try them out and see if they are of any use, to simply rely on what one learned twenty or thirty years ago, to keep parroting the same old crap, to pledge eternal allegiance to some old dogma is also a waste of time.

The article I originally pointed the link to may or may not contain elements of truth. However, the point is to try different ideas out in the hope that one of them, one of them if we're lucky, will eventually turn out to have some seeds of thought that may, again if we're lucky, cast enough original light on a problem that goes back a long way that we may actually make some progress towards a solution. Without some concept of what we're dealing with, a concept a little more contemporary than Marx's, all these efforts to change the world are, once again,a waste of time. And, in many cases, may actually do more harm than good, which one could well argue is what happened with the misapplication of Marx's original ideas.

Without some new ideas that really include some concepts of what really motivates people, i.e. psychology — and a bit of creativity and imagination — we are well and truly fucked. I'll place a bet on it.

For 'psychopathology' perhaps, read 'human nature', (anathema to the materialist of course).

But I'm in conservative mood tonight, so might I just broach the potentially quite liberating (?) thought that the world is going to hell in a handcart and always has been,that 'progress' on any grand scale is a grand illusion, and the way forward is to start from a viewpoint that there are limitations rather than endless possiblities and your own sphere of influence is small. Then given all that, do what you can.

T.E.Hulme, 1914, writing about the French Revolution:

"They had been taught by Rousseau that man was by nature good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him. Remove all these and the infinite possibilities of man would have a chance. This is what made them think that something positive could come out of disorder, this is what created the religious enthusiasm. Here is the root of all romanticism: that man the individual is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress.

One can define the classical quite clearly as the opposite to this. Man is an extraordinary fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him."

Grand ambitions about stopping environmental destruction, illustrated by hysterical comparisons to serial rapists, are I would submit unhelpful and have a dodgy psychopathology of their own.

Two comments ripped from the discussion at Orion by someone who calls himself Alpha Griz, normally a name I'd steer well clear of but in this case I think he has points of interest, although clearly he thinks outside the box of southern England and those who think it's clever to say something as trite as "analysing politics by means of of psychobabble and cod sociology":

Mr. Jensen gives the impression the madness is a recent thing. I believe the madness began with the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, where it all began 6,000 years ago, and is now reaching its logical conclusion. The rise of the city-state was accompanied by big agriculture, authoritarian religion, ideology, militarism, the money economy, and the conquest of indigenous peoples and nature. Driving that conquest has been hubris, beginning with Gilgamesh clear-cutting the cedars of Lebanon, defying the gods and destroying the forest guardian, Humbaba, leading to the ecological collapse and desertification that destroyed the early Mesopotamian civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates valley where present-day Iraq is located. Although Mesopotamian civilization did not survive, its legacy of deforestation, overgrazing, water depletion, soil erosion, and war lived on, spreading throughout the Middle East, further West to Greece and Rome, then followed Western civilization to America. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida have deep roots in this first civilization. So does Europe. So, for that matter, does America, from the Columbian landfall to Manifest Destiny,and our current, politically dysfunctional, hyper-consumerist society. The madness always existed but industrialism has multiplied the effects of the madness by increasing the technological power of destruction.

So Mr. Jensen. The world has not gone mad. It always has been, at least since civilization began. You are just seeing its intensification.

But there are pockets of sanity. Always were. They are everywhere. In our more peaceable communities, in our art and music, our literature, and in indigenous cultures. Are they enough to stop the madness? I have no answer. I believe industrial civilization will consume itself. I see a dying way of life in the grip of ever more desperate temper tantrums, industrial civilization’s final frenzy, clinging to an ideology of power, wealth and the exploitation and control of nature that will only consume itself, a hyper-capitalistic Götterdammerung–a spasm from the dying of a rough beast. We may either destroy ourselves, or what is left of humanity will regroup and come out better in the long run. Continued human survival will depend on a shift from being creatures predisposed as they are now to violence, territoriality, ideology, self-interest, and destructive use of nature to being creatures predisposed to awareness, mindfulness, compassion, generosity, love, and, in Wendell Berry’s terms, “kindly use of nature.”

Another point: Mr. Jensen should pay attention to how nature is fighting back. Look at the violent weather in 2010 around the world. Devastating whole regions with violent thunderstorms, drought, wildfires, epic flooding and it will only get worse as the planet fights back against its abuse by human industrial civilization, fights back against CO2 emissions. He calls for humans to resist the power structure that continues this 6,000-year abuse, but nature is already beginning a mighty resistance. I say, we humans better yield now if know what is good for us. And maybe try to get along with nature…

I amend my comments to the extent that Mr. Jensen does allude to past abuses by civilization, which have not been corrected by contemporary humans, and he does hint that the madness is not just a recent thing. So I was not correct in saying that he ignores this historical continuum. But I stand by one of my original points—we may not be able to resist or stop this civilization. It contains in its very nature the seeds of its own destruction. We may ended up sitting on the sidelines watching it destroy itself, not able to stop it. Won’t be pretty, but if we survive this cataclysm, those who survive may just be able to come up with a better way and live it while the planet heals. If human consciousness has adequately evolved we may have learned from the experience and practice a more sustainable way of life and our stories will warn us not to make the same mistake twice if (and that’s a big IF) we as a species survive our first big mistake. If we don’t, we will be one of the shortest-lived species in the history of the planet.

This is not that I do not recognize the great and positive accomplishments of human civilization, but so far we humans have not been able to disentangle those from the slow-moving disaster of militarism and the continued exploitation and destruction of the natural world (including indigenous cultures, the healthiest of which have been relatively peaceable and connected to place and living comfortably within nature’s arrangements). Humanity is now at a crossroads, where the model that has informed the 6000-year civilization may be at its inevitable end.

Another point: Mr. Jensen should pay attention to how nature is fighting back. Look at the violent weather in 2010 around the world. Devastating whole regions with violent thunderstorms, drought, wildfires, epic flooding and it will only get worse as the planet fights back against its abuse by human industrial civilization, fights back against CO2 emissions. He calls for humans to resist the power structure that continues this 6,000-year abuse, but nature is already beginning a mighty resistance.

Mr (?) Alpha Griz has interesting points to make otherwise, but I think he firmly crosses the line to dodgy territory by personifying nature like he does. And his view on agriculture being the root of all evil sounds a little sweeping as well. (Surely it was the other way round by the way: agriculture made possible a more stable way of life and brought about the surplus of food, which led to ever larger communities and... oh, but we all know that already.)

I think I would have to largely agree with Hugh - and Hulme - on this in the end. I recognise the anger and frustration in Jensen's article, but I too am in a bit of a pessimistic mood this evening. Or cod realistic maybe.

JV, that schmuck you quote blethering on about 'civilization' ruining everything really does need a kick in the tender parts. You can read nonsense like that on what I believe are called 'Deep Green' websites, where the contributors almost delight in disasters and disease as this will, in their eyes, rid the poor abused planet of human infestation & speed its return to an idyll where just a few of the saintly sit chewing leaves amid the mangrove roots. What utter bollocks.

Hugh Weldon wrote:On the other hand, I caught a Spanish news report last week saying that properties in the Almeria region were going from 30 000 euros for a small apartment. I am tempted to investigate further.

That might be because Almeria is becoming a desert, literally so, thanks to climate change.